James Baldwin, 62 years ago

In light of the weekend headlines¹, I thought I'd share this compelling passage at the start of an essay that James Baldwin penned for The Saturday Review of December 21, 1963 ("A Talk to Teachers").

 Footnote

1. For example:

• Greenland is hard to defend. As Trump threatens, the Danes are trying.
• New Trump memo seen as threat to lawyers, attempt to scare off lawsuits
• Autocrats worldwide rolling back rights and rule of law — and citing Trump's example
• Musk and Trump ratchet up involvement in Wisconsin Supreme Court race
• Musk Is Positioned to Profit Off Billions in New Government Contracts
• IRS nears deal with ICE to share addresses of suspect undocumented immigrants
• ICE in Florida detaining Cubans during immigration appointments
• White House seeks corporate sponsorships for Easter event
• After losing millions in federal funds, Texas food banks must now rely on donors 
• Trump turbulence leads allies to rethink reliance on U.S. weapons
• Germany unlocking billions to supercharge military
• Russia launches massive drone attack on Kyiv ahead of ceasefire talks
• Bernie Sanders is drawing record crowds as he pushes Democrats to 'fight oligarchy'
• Bernie Sanders and AOC draw huge crowd to Tucson’s Catalina High School
• Iowans Are Backing Trans People After Lawmakers Legalized Discrimination
• RFK Jr. Vows To Make Measles Deaths So Common They Won’t Be Upsetting Anymore [The Onion, but not wrong]

Book cover: "A Dream of Dracula" — plus other vampire stuff

• Title: A Dream of Dracula
• Subtitle: In Search of the Living Dead
• Author: Leonard Wolf (1923-2019). He was featured in a 2023 Papergreat post about another book of his: 1968's Voices from the Love Generation.
• Dust jacket design: John Renfer, using a 1941 photo that's copyrighted by RKO Pictures.
• Publication date: 1972
• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 327
• Dust jacket price: $8.95 (which would a steep $67 in February 2025, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics)
• Dedication: "This book is dedicated Bram Stoker on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the birth of DRACULA."
• Excerpt #1: "Meanwhile, somewhere in that field of desire and Coca-Colas, hashish, LSD and old-fashioned, ordinary picnic pleasure, a child is born." [Wolf is writing about the Altamont Free Concert of 1969.]
• Excerpt #2: "Dracula is from the moment that we meet him in Bram Stoker's novel a dry horror, which is a way of saying that he is intelligent evil, unlike the wet, slime-covered things that slide through our instinctive dreams."
• Excerpt #3: "Vampires have even been reported in Outer Mongolia. And if Hollywood is any prophet, they will be found waiting for mankind on planets where our rocket ships have not yet landed."
• Excerpt #4: "Christopher Lee is the best and most famous screen Dracula since Bela Lugosi. I sat in his London living room, which felt as if all of its mirrors, couches, tables and walls had been dipped into a tasteful sea-green dye. Lee had the color television on and was watching an important cricket match. ... He spoke more or less nonstop, in a rich but curiously charged voice. It was at once evident that he took the role of Dracula with great seriousness and had read all about Stoker and the folklore of vampires. He had very clear opinions about his relationship to the role. He pointed out that he had nothing to do with the scripts of the films he made."
• Excerpt #5: "Dracula, then, is a novel that lurches toward greatness, stumbling over perceived and unperceived mysteries: Christianity, insanity, identity, a spectrum of incest possibilities, marriage, homosexuality, immortality and death." 
• Excerpt #6: "The vampire fascinates a century that is as much frightened as it is exhilarated by its rush toward sexual freedom. ... He kiss permits all unions. ... Moreover, his is an easy love that evades the usual failures of the flesh. ... And it stands for death."   
• Rating on Goodreads: 3.68 stars (out of 5)
• Goodreads review: In 2014, Aric Cushing summed it up thusly: "A personal journey through a landscape of childhood dreams, melancholy, and vampire sentiment."
• Rating on Amazon: 4.1 stars (out of 5) 
• Amazon review excerpt: In 2004, mirasreviews wrote: "'A Dream of Dracula' is a meditation on the novel 'Dracula' and its 20th century progeny — literary, cultural, and personal — published on the 75th anniversary of Bram Stoker's novel, in 1972. A few years later, author Leonard Wolf would publish the most elaborately annotated version of 'Dracula.' Wolf is one of the world's foremost 'Dracula' scholars, but the novel has touched him more intimately than other academics. 'A Dream of Dracula' is a collection of ruminations on 'Dracula,' vampires, blood, and death, often is a stream of conscious style, all connected, directly or loosely, to the 19th century gothic novel whose popularity is set to survive longer than even its vampiric villain did. The book's ten chapters weave in and out of the past and present."
• Other views: The book is discussed by "Tinhuviel Artanis" in a 2006 LiveJournal post: "This is ... one of the best books on the subject of vampires, vampirism, the folklore of the the vampire, and the vampire's influence on popular culture. Published in 1972, it has that air of revolution, the quest for freedom, and the celebration of the absurd wrapped neatly in its poetry." ... And Alex Bledsoe wrote about Wolf's book on his blog, stating: "Wolf was actually born in Transylvania, and the book is a dive into both the legend of Dracula in popular culture, and into the psyche of Leonard Wolf. One is obviously more interesting now than the other, but even the personal asides and extended vignettes have their entertainment value. Wolf was writing at the end of the Sixties, so some of his interviewees actually use phrases like, 'groovy' and 'turned on.'"

But wait, there's more

I've been keeping some vampiric tidbits tucked away, but they'll never make their own standalone post, so I'm posting them here:

A 2023 tweet:

Mark Hodgson of the website Black Hole wrote in 2014 about 1921's Drakula halála, a now-lost film that predates Nosferatu as an adaptation of Stoker's novel. Hodgson writes: "While the plot doesn't follow Stoker's novel, many situations are familiar from it. Dracula's immortality, his castle, his brides, Mary's suffering health after meeting him, the asylum ... possibly the story elements were juggled to dodge any copyright issue?"

Also in 2014, Hodgson wrote a fun post on Black Hole about visiting Bela Lugosi's former home.

And speaking of Lugosi, here's a photo I took recently of a Lugosi life mask mounted on the wall at Terror Trader, an amazeballs horror-themed store in Chandler, Arizona.

Receipt tucked inside 1978 Radio Shack computer programming book

Truly interesting paper receipts are going by the wayside. They were already being phased out when I launched this blog in 2010 (I think this is the first one I wrote about), and now the demise of this kind of ephemera is rapidly accelerating. We get emailed our receipts. We crumple them up and toss them in the wastebin on the way out the door. Or we get crappy little receipts with few details. But there's still the old stuff out there for us to stumble upon. In drawers. In desks. Or tucked away inside books.

This receipt remained inside 57 Practical Programs & Games in BASIC since the day it was handwritten by the sales clerk at a Tucson, Arizona, Radio Shack in October 1980. It tanned the two pages it was stuck between at the front of the book. It was a fairly pricey book for the time: $3.95 in 1980 is about $15.25 today. But, then again, home computing was a pricey hobby. And Radio Shack was probably the go-to spot for home computer enthusiasts. It remained so for quite a while. I purchased my first PC from a Radio Shack in Gettysburg in either 1993 or 1994. 

This book was written by Ken Tracton and published by Radio Shack in 1978. The subtitle on the front alluringly states "Programs for Everything from Space War Games to Blackjack ... from Craps to I Ching!" But that's a bit misleading. By my quick count, only 6 of the 57 programs in the book are games. (And I Ching isn't really a game.)

Most of the "practical" BASIC programs included probably sound very dull to today's computer users: Annular Sections, Bubble Sort, Compounded Amounts, Fibonacci Numbers, Gaussian Probability Function, Hydrocarbon Combustion, Inverse Hyperbolic Functions, L-Pad Minimum Loss System, Points on the Circumference, Vector Cross Product. These are programs, though, that provide quick results that otherwise would have required a lot of handwritten math, a scientific calculator, a reference book and/or an accountant to work out. The whole book appears to be available on the Internet Archive, if you're interested. Commenting on Goodreads in 2015, Jerry states: "I tried a couple of the programs in HotPaw BASIC on the iPad, and they still work. Why wouldn’t they? So now I have a BASIC program on my iPad to tell me the day of the week from any date post-1752."

If it's computer games you wanted more than mathematical nerdness, there were other books at the time, such as 1978's BASIC Computer Games by David H. Ahl, and, by 1984, there was COMPUTE!'s Guide to Adventure Games if you wanted to try your hand at creating something akin to Pirate Adventure, Zork or Planetfall.

March 2025 Postcrossing updates

Some Sunday afternoon postcard updates as I try to figure out why the theme song from 1975's Almost Anything Goes is stuck in my head — and why that early precursor of all of today's reality show nonsense has a rating of 8.5 on IMDb. I love 1970s culture as much as anyone, but sheesh. Anyway...

Postcrossing Arrivals

Gavin from Scotland, who works on technology that services pipelines, sent a photo postcard of snow-covered Castle Fraser and added in the message on the back: "We have actually had sun all week for a change. So hopefully spring is on its way." Alas, "Spring" is on its way here in the desert, too, as the forecast says we'll be in the mid-90s by the end of March.

Anke from Germany has a cat named Louis Vuitton and mentions that she's from Friedberg, which has a huge historic castle complex and a special connection to Elvis Presley, who was stationed there during his time in the U.S. Army.

Bona from Hong Kong, who prefers "chill" video games, writes: "It's pretty hot here too, but we are surrounded by water."

Victoria from Manchester, England, sent a postcard that features King Charles III's "Diversity and Community" postage stamp, one of four marking his new reign. Victoria writes: "I have a cat called Willow. She is the cutest in the world! When I adopted her in 2022 she had been there the longest as she was so timid, but she's really come out of her shell now. I think she's ready for a friend. I've been inquiring about kittens to join our family!"

Lothar from Germany, who is a retired mechanical engineer and works on model trains, also sent a great castle postcard featuring Meersburg. He added: "We visited it several times during our holidays in that region, but not in winter." He mailed the card with a stamp celebrating 500 years of the Wasunger Carnival.

Thanks and messages

from Postcrossing postcard recipients

Ari from Italy writes: "I received your lovely postcard (at the speed of light, too), thank you SO SO SO MUCH!! I love it, it truly made my day. And thank you for writing part of it in Italian, it warmed my heart so much. We are also very worried about the US's current situation, but I hope you'll be able to be hopeful towards the future; the world has known progress, peace and cooperation before, and I believe that oppression and violence won't survive for long."

"B" from Belgium writes: "I have recently received your postcard. I don't dare to say anything about the political trends in the US. All I can say is be patient during four years. ... I am a federal civil servant. In my country, the status of a federal civil servant is threatened. The current government want to eliminate it. I have already done a strike day. I have the impression that this is a general movement of which DT represents the hardest face. Thank you for your sending and for your words in my mother tongue. I appreciate it."

SimLing from Malaysia writes: "Hello Chris! Thank you for your cute postcard of your cats, it makes my day. I am so happy to receive the very first postcard from you since this account started. It will be the cover page of my collection. I've listened to 2025 remaster version of 'The Lamp lies down on Board Way' [sic] which just releases few days ago. Artistic!! And will always pay attention to the artist."

Jasmin from Germany writes: "Thanks a lot for your postcard! Your three cats on the picture are really cute. And I really appreciate your words. Well, D.T. is on the news every single day. And everyday I ask myself again: what the hell is he doing today? How he treats Selensky, how he speaks about Ukraine as if Ukraine caused this war. I spent some days in Hamburg last weekend and did not watch any news. But then one evening I suddenly read a headline that said Selensky was booted out the White House. And some people had annotated the article, complaining about his outfit — because he was not wearing a suit. I mean — what?? Everybody knows that what he is wearing is his kind of uniform. He even met King Charles wearing this 'normal' clothes ... Oh my goodness. As if there was nothing more important in this world. So I continued reading and started book no. 9 this year! Last year I read 55 books."

Lena from Latvia writes: "Hello Chris! Already felt the slight excitement and joy of receiving a postcard letter! I am 60 years old and writing letters to loved ones and acquaintances was a common thing once upon a time. I am glad that there is such a community of people postcrossing. It was nice to read some of the text in Latvian. (The content of this snippet is not joyful, though). A person always makes a choice where to direct his attention and with this attention feeds and supports an event, a phenomenon, a state. Just thinking out loud. ... I'm glad to live on this Earth! Every day is a gift! And people, all people are connected to each other like a single cloth, the fabric of being. We influence each other and we can do it consciously. You have powerful professional opportunities to influence the inner state of people, the vector of attention can be directed to the beautiful aspects of life. There are so many of them around! I seem to be getting carried away ... I've worked in different fields — now a school librarian. Today I taught a class at an elementary school about Astrid Lindgren's books and was pleased that some of the children took the books to read. For some reason, Fahrenheit 451 came to mind."

COVID-19 anniversary and the kindness of Canadians

It was five years ago today — March 13, 2020 — that President Donald Trump declared COVID-19 to be a national emergency. It came amid movie stars Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson announcing they had tested positive for the coronavirus, a global stock market crash, the NBA suspending its regular season, Broadway going dark, etc., etc. Soon, the schools, and almost everything, would be closed.

So much happened in a few whirlwind days.

So much more has happened since then. Lordy, so much more.

One of the things I must remind myself of, and that is increasingly difficult to find these days in the United States, is how much grace there was in 2020, even with Trump as president. 

And not just in the United States, of course. Brian Busby, author of the outstanding book blog The Dusty Bookcase, recently sent me a piece of early 2021 ephemera that tells one small story of how Canada tried with deal with the isolation brought on by the necessary COVID-19 lockdowns. Canadians were given these free, postage-paid postcards "to reach out to a friend or family member, whether they're in town or anywhere in Canada, courtesy of Canada Post." A small gesture in the grand scheme of things, but an incredibly kind one.

More than 13 million of the postcards were printed and distributed. At the time, it cost about $1 Canadian to mail a postcard within the country (not including finding or buying a postcard). So it was especially good for folks on tight finances.

Mediaplus had the contract to design the postcards. You can see all of the designs here. 

In a March 2021 interview, Canada Post's Sylvie Lapointe told NPR's All Things Considered: "We just thought we need to do something for Canadians and try to put a smile on each other's face and to tell someone that you care about them and you've been missing them for the past year. ... A lot of people seem to be sending them to someone in long-term care, so someone who's been isolated from their family for a long time."

Nowadays, when Canadians are sending each other postcards or messaging each other, they're likely discussing that the hell is wrong with the United States. President Trump 2.0 continued his bizarre imperialist ramblings today about our wonderful neighbor to the north:  "To be honest with you, Canada only works as a state. It doesn't, we don't need anything they have. As a state, it would be one of the great states anyway. This would be the most incredible country visually. If you look at a map, they drew an artificial line right through it between Canada and the U.S., just a straight artificial line. Somebody did it a long time ago, many, many decades ago, and, uh, makes no sense. It's so perfect as a great and cherished state keeping Oh, Canada, the national anthem. I love it. I think it's great. Keep it. But it'll be for the state. One of our greatest states, maybe our greatest state."

As Brian Busby notes: "American wine and spirits have been pulled from our liquor stores. American fruit and vegetables are spoiling in our grocery stores. Like Covid, this is like nothing I've ever seen."

And like nothing we ever fathomed seeing, or wanted to see.

Ruth Manning-Sanders' horror novel

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Answer time! The novel that was the subject of a trivia question in Friday's post was 1930's The Crochet Woman, by none other than Ruth Manning-Sanders. No one guessed right. In fact, no one guessed at all. That may be due to only a couple of people stumbling upon the post. But I digress.

The Crochet Woman, published by Coward-McCann, features as its antagonist the titular and witchlike Crochet Woman. As the dust jacket states, she "works with gossip and innuendo in place of curses and spells. Knotting hatred of youth into her endless pattern, she bestirs herself to bring havoc into the lives of her young neighbors."

Manning-Sanders' opening passage describes her monstrous visage: her evil eyes, "tightly drawn-in mouth," and pinched nose — "all the rest of her face was pink withered flesh with downy white hairs on it."

Beyond the opening passage pictured Friday, we know that the Crochet Woman (she has no name) is a bad person because she spews hateful language toward others — language you would not read in Manning-Sanders' later fairy tale collections for children:

" 'She has a hole in her stocking — the slut,' said the crochet woman, though Betty was still too far off for even a large hole to be seen by those light-colored, watching eyes."

Now, it's my understanding that "slut" wasn't quite the socially unacceptable vulgarity in 1930 that it is today. But it was still a very rude insult. And it's a bit jarring to see it in a book by Manning-Sanders!

Later in the novel we get a bit of flashback to the crochet woman's younger days...

"The crochet woman stood watching and listening. Suddenly thirty-eight years, that were thirty-eight gray-colored and hissing snakes, glided backward over the road, and there was the young crochet woman, in her veil and her orange blossom, stepping out of the church. She had caught her man, caught him by the neat lie that no virgin (for all her orange blossom) might invent, and her feet in their white shoes walked niminy piminy, niminy piminy, down the path between the graves, and her hand gripped the arm of Jan's grandfather as if what she had caught she would hold forever more; and her heart swelled with a malicious pride."

I'm exaggerating a bit in calling this horror, of course. But it's by turns creepy and tragic. All that "gossip and innuendo" mentioned on the dust jacket has the effect of turning happy lives heartbreakingly upside-down. (It might have made for a great Gene Tierney movie.) This comes toward the end:

  " 'Here ... you get out,' said Mounster.

  " 'I will in a minute,' said the crochet woman. 'but I'll tell you first who broke your heart, if it was my last word.'

  " 'I'm not curious,' said Mounster.

  " 'I broke it,' said the crochet woman; and her splatted eye glowed like a new risen star. 'I told Betty about you, and you about Betty; every time you quarreled 'twas I sowed the seed; 'twas I told Betty you'd wed her for a warming-pan; I told her about Lucy Tregeer and Alice Tranter; I turned her baby into a pigsy for her; 'twas I told you of what that Robert was up to every time your back was turned ...'

  "Since she wouldn't go out, the Mounster picked her up and carried her, but she didn't struggle or object, justly stayed stiffly in his arms like a wizened doll, with her shiny black boots dangling, and she went on talking at him in her soft malicious voice."

There's a happy ending a few dozen pages later, though. And the crochet woman must live, in her old and wretched body and mind, with the reality that her nefarious plan did not succeed. Just like all those pouting, defeated villains in the fairy tales that Manning-Sanders would tell in the following half-century.

That's as close as Stubby the black cat wanted to get to the Crochet Woman. By the way, the name at the bottom of that wonderful dust jacket illustration is Elizabeth Cale Toeker (or Toeken?). I can't find a single thing about her online. We have a history mystery on our hands! 

Saturday's postcard: Fairmount Park in Philadelphia

Today's linen postcard, mailed in 1944, showcases Horticultural Hall at Philadelphia's Fairmount Park.

Horticultural Hall was one of many structures built for the International Exhibition of Arts, Manufactures, and Products of the Soil and Mine that was held in Philadelphia in 1876. It was meant to be a permanent building, unlike some of the other structures for that event, and thus had an iron and glass frame atop a brick-and-marble foundation. And it was a tourist destination and home to tropical plants for decades after the exhibition. But the decision was made to demolish it after it was severely damaged by Hurricane Hazel in 1954, a decade after this postcard was mailed. The Fairmount Park Horticulture Center now stands on that site.

This card was mailed to Newville, Pennsylvania, with the following message, written in pencil and cursive:

Spending a few hours in Phila. I don't know what to do with you now. I owe you .50 as I only spent 1.50 for very pretty flowers. I hope I don't spend it while I am away. Wish you were along. Aunt Lillie and Ruth.

This card was mailed with the 1-cent "Four Freedoms" stamp. According to Gordon T. Trotter of the Smithsonian National Postal Museum: "On February 12, 1943, a 1-cent green stamp was issued to promote the spread of the Four Freedoms throughout the world. The design is an allegory of Liberty holding the Torch of Enlightenment, below which is inscribed 'Freedom of Speech and Religion, from Want and Fear.' Intended as a patriotic regular issue stamp, the stamp replaced the 1-cent National Defense stamp of 1940."

The Mystic Stamp Company adds: "President Franklin Roosevelt personally selected the image for U.S. #908. He believed that the stamp should convey to the world the reasons the U.S. had joined the war — the Four Freedoms outlined in his 1941 State of the Union address."

FDR's Four Freedom's speech concludes: "Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights or keep them. Our strength is our unity of purpose. To that high concept there can be no end save victory."

Note: This is Papergreat's 1,000th post in the Postcards category. That's a lot of postcards.

Guess the horror novel

This terrifying opening passage could be straight out of a Stephen King or Daphne du Maurier story. Any guesses regarding the novel and/or author? I'll be back with the answer Sunday. Unless the witch gets me.